All of wmoore's Comments + Replies

wmoore00

Please note that as of late last year the official development environment is now built with Vagrant. The primary repo contains a Vagrantfile and all the chef recipes (derived from our production recipes where possible) necessary to configure a base Ubuntu box for LW development.

The instructions for using this are at: Development-VM-Image.

wmoore20

Great to hear you're interested in contributing Chris. The LW codebase takes a bit to get your head around so I'd certainly suggest starting with smaller bugs or small features before diving into big new features. You should definitely get in touch with us (TrikeApps) and Luke to discuss what you want to work on to make sure it's the best use of your time and your approach considers all angles.

For reference, Accepted issues are generally bugs. The Accepted status indicates they have been reviewed and acknowledged as a bug. Approved is used to indicate tick... (read more)

wmoore200

SiteMeter in the sidebar was the cause of this. It has been removed.

4fubarobfusco
Thank you!
wmoore140

I received a lot of errors over the weekend relating to a performance regression introduced in the last set of changes. Eugine, you were one of the people affected by these errors. I released a fix for this yesterday and have not seen those errors since. Work is also underway to migrate to a new database server.

wmoore140

John implemented the new feature, I just integrated it and deployed it.

wmoore30

This is actually a bug, not a feature. Some major changes to how karma is stored and passed around the application were made in order to implement the percentage tooltips. Scores are now passed around as an array containing the number of up votes and down votes, where previously it was the difference of the two. It appears the this array is being incorrectly rendered in the side bar, instead of the calculated score.

4Larks
I think this is bug is actually an unintended feature.

Given that people are already coming up with crude hacks for extracting some of that information, it would be nice if the percentage tooltip displayed the raw array as well.

wmoore40

You're correct, John deliberately changed this as he thought it was a bug. I'll chat to some people to work out what the desired behaviour is.

8Vladimir_Nesov
Previous behavior was chosen intentionally, see this thread for the discussion. I think the change should be reverted.
wmoore30

I've just deployed a fix that will apply to all new poll votes. Thanks jimrandomh for passing on the bug report and initial patch.

wmoore40

Your fix for the incorrect median calculation has been deployed.

2NancyLebovitz
I got a mean of -9.91765890411e+16, so something is still wrong.
wmoore220

Fix for this and issue 327 has been deployed.

wmoore00

Test in Chrome

wmoore160

2 karma points are now required to start a new discussion. We'll see how this goes at reducing the spam.

wmoore40

Morendil your latest patch has been applied and deployed. We took the liberty of inverting the preference for two reasons: Firstly it made more sense for the checkbox to be checked when the kibitzer was enabled and secondly we added a note that full compatibility requires Firefox for now, the text of which was hard to phrase with the uncheck to enable behaviour.

2Morendil
Great, thanks! I note that the revision you've pulled is 0.5, which should be a lot more cross-browser than previous ones. I've done some testing under IE, Chrome and Safari. The original relied on XPath queries to locate page elements corresponding to scores and names. Now that the script is part of the LW codebase, I was able to simplify the script's operation by including a special CSS stylesheet when the Anti-Kibitzer is active, and acting directly on the display rules. This is faster and more compatible.
wmoore20

Hi ciphergoth, I've made some changes this morning that make the Less Wrong code base compatible with PostgreSQL 8.3, which is available in the karmic repositories. The change is on the 'postgres-8.3' branch in git. I have run through and revised the Hacking on Less Wrong wiki page this morning on an Ubuntu 9.10 install and have confirmed that it works. It would be great if you could have another go at getting the code up and running and let me know how you go.

2Paul Crowley
Wow, thanks! OK, will try tomorrow evening. Great work!
wmoore30

It's unclear -- do you mean that the number of points received for posts gets multiplied by 10, both for positive and negative votes?

Yes an up vote on a post is worth 10 karma points to the contributor, a down vote -10 points.

With regard to discussion, I just implemented what I was instructed to do.

-10thomblake
wmoore40

Some changes to karma have been deployed today. Posts will now show scores less than zero, previously scores below zero were shown as zero. Votes on posts are now worth 10 points up or down to the contributor. Also the threshold to be able to post is now 50, up from 20.

5Vladimir_Nesov
It's unclear -- do you mean that the number of points received for posts gets multiplied by 10, both for positive and negative votes? This factor seems too dramatic. I'd go for 2 or 3, no more. One also has to take into account that posts get more votes than comments simply because more people rate them, so the effect of a post is already greater than that of a comment. Also should (have) been discussed in one of the open/meta threads in advance of deployment.
wmoore00

Markdown test

wmoore00

Does anyone know if these accounts are being managed or is there the possibility as you say for a siege at a later date?

5Vladimir_Nesov
The siege began. Two bots, registered on 2 and 4th June respectively, just posted their spam messages. Furthermore, the messages hack the wiki markup. It may be a while for all the bots to run out, and new ones continue registering as we speak. You should really install that captcha. ETA: 5 triggered bots so far.
0Vladimir_Nesov
I don't know, it was more of a joke. From what I googled, adding a captcha seems to be just a matter of installing an extension.
wmoore10

The missing comment's have been scraped off the old OB site and should all now be present,

wmoore10

We did our best to try to link up OB names with Less Wrong user names. However as there were many hundreds of names this had be done automatically. For a match to be made the name on OB and username on LW had to match, as did the email address on both sides.

If you supplied an email address on OB then that will have been imported and you can claim the account by following the forgotten password process for the account. Assuming it has your email address you will be sent an email and be able to reset the password.

0Cyan
Thanks for all your work on the site!
0SoullessAutomaton
My username on OB was slightly different. Is there any way to merge those comments into this account after the fact? If not, no worries. I don't have any particular interest in claiming the other account if merging isn't possible.
wmoore00

Yes, we're working on this. The missing comments were omitted from the Type Pad export. It has been raised with TypePad.

1wmoore
The missing comment's have been scraped off the old OB site and should all now be present,
wmoore10

'Top' now defaults to 'All time', instead of 'Today'

wmoore00

The behaviour was all inherited from the initial Reddit codebase. It just isn't feasible to rip out and re-implement all the javascript dependant parts of the site that are already there and working.

wmoore00

There's no reason I can think of why you wouldn't be able to edit your comments. What exactly is happening?

0Jack
Huh, it looks fine now. What I might have been doing was trying to edit the comments through the recent comments page and my own comments page– which I guess you can't do. Sorry.
wmoore30

No there isn't a way to check vote counts at the moment.

wmoore10

The main driver for the limit was to prevent someone registering one or more accounts and being free to vote everything down.

5MBlume
Well, in that case, we could just pick a threshhold and say anyone above that level gets the keys to the ammo closet. ETA: Or the garden shed, to stick with the going metaphor.
wmoore110

I've verified the numbers, thomblake has posted 2538 down votes. 93t is 11801 in base 36. Adding 436 articles drop the percentage slightly to 20.7%.

7Mulciber
Is there a way for us to see on our own how many downvotes and upvotes we've given? I mean, I guess there is a way to check your total downvotes now, but I'd have to downvote a lot of posts to get the information that way.
wmoore00

Due to some users being unexpectedly limited from down voting by the prior change. The threshold is now four times your karma.

0pangloss
I thought the point was to limit people's ability to down vote. Wouldn't that be a reason not to change the threshold?
wmoore60

Quick fix deployed. I did some analysis of user's down vote count and karma. This change allows everyone to down vote that doesn't have a massively skewed down vote to karma ratio (Like 21 to 2 or 548 to 137). Obviously this still leaves thomblake roughly 500 short.

wmoore60

It was mistakenly assumed that most people's down vote count would not be approaching their karma, particularly for high karma users. I'll do some more research and discuss it with Eliezer.

Initial quick fix: downvote limit = 4x karma.

wmoore00

The anchor was removed when the article content was removed from comment permalinks as the comment should be visible on an average sized screen without jumping down. The content above the comment is also relevant to the permalink now more so than before so this was another reason why it was removed.

1Vladimir_Nesov
I don't see how that header is at all informative. I link to the text of the comment, everything else is the context of that text, secondary info, accessed only if necessary.
wmoore00

Just standard Markdown:

![Alt text](http://example.com/path/to/img.jpg)

Check your inbox.

1Vladimir_Nesov
Well, that I know. The question was about uploading.
wmoore00

Thinking about this more I decided to make a start on an FAQ/user guide on the wiki.

Feel free to add anything that you feel is useful.

wmoore00

There is lots of content that is managed with styles to allow the dynamic aspects of the site. CSS is a required browser feature of the site.

1thomblake
Surely this is not strictly necessary, and against the principles of progressive enhancement? What about accessibility issues?
wmoore00

What are you seeing? Why would you need to exceed Eliezer's karma? The limit on down votes is based on your karma, so you should be able to cast more than 500 down votes at the moment.

0Vladimir_Nesov
He has already cast about 2,500 downvotes, so he's now retroactively banned from downvoting for a long time. I think this should be considered a bug. Btw, the anchor is missing again in Permalinks, so I have to add #comments at the end manually to make nicer links.
wmoore00

Javascript is a required browser feature of the site. Its needed for most interaction (as opposed to just clicking around and reading) and to load the side bar.

An FAQ/user guide for the site is needed. In its absence the Reddit help is mostly applicable.

0[anonymous]
Javascript is only "needed" for basic functionality because that's the way the site has been designed. It could have been designed to degrade gracefully, in which case everything would work perfectly fine without Javascript, with the exception of a few extra page reloads being required.
wmoore00

You are notified when you reach the limit by a message stating how many down votes you've made and what your current karma is. Until then I imagine you should not let this limit influence you:

Note: It is possible to see this message and the down vote count be greater than the karma due its dynamic nature.

0Vladimir_Nesov
Also interesting: how did you upload an image in the comment? Is it an admins-only hack?
5Vladimir_Nesov
I disagree, I want to reserve that power for where I see fit to apply it. I would prefer to calibrate my behavior, so that I won't be left out unexpectedly.
wmoore20

We've deployed a fix for the Top Contributors that should see all 10 users listed. Although it may not be immediately visible due to client and server side caching. You may need to give it up to an hour before it shows up.

1MBlume
awesome, thanks =)
wmoore00

Up votes aren't capped but your point about lurkers is interesting. The primary motivation for the change is to stop it being easy to just register an account then down vote everything you can find.

wmoore20

We've just deployed another related change: Now you can only cast as many down votes as your karma value.

0Vladimir_Nesov
Then it should be possible to see how many down votes I've cast, to know how many are left. In practice, I expect that the number of downvotes is significantly less than the amount of Karma, but I'm not sure. If this is true, then the limitation is roughly equivalent to simply prohibiting people with Karma less than a threshold to downvote.
2SarahNibs
I would assume you can only cast as many up votes as your karma value, too? I'm not sure what the change accomplishes. Was there a thread on this I missed? ETA: capping the up votes similarly will produce bad effects. :) But I'm still worried this tells legitimate lurkers "contribute written comments or we don't want to know when you think a comment/post is poor!"
0MBlume
I like this
wmoore20

I would still like to see a list of recent edits and/or active pages in the Less Wrong blog sidebar, and a list of recent blog posts and recent comments in the Wiki sidebar.

If the recent edits were available as a feed (which they are after a quick look at MediaWiki) then this is very easy to implement. In fact it would be entirely Javascript. This is exactly how the "New on Overcoming Bias" section in the side bar works.

wmoore00

Ahh that's why there are people missing. When the site first went live and before it was announced someone found it, created an account with a questionable username and posted an article of little relevance. A hasty fix was put in place to exclude anyone from the Top Contributors list that had a banned article. Now that the community is much bigger this fix can probably be reversed, which would see the missing people re-appear.

0pjeby
Are you sure? I don't have any banned articles, but I've also been missing from the list for a while.
wmoore00

We'll keep an eye on this. We won't be chasing fixes for developer releases but if the problem persists it will be fixed.

wmoore40

The inbox is a feature that came for free with the Reddit codebase but it was "lost" when the site was restyled. You will notice that the formatting of inbox page is totally messed up, this is also because it wasn't included in redesign. Notification of replies is on the list of things to implement but there's some higher priority work going on at the moment. Since it is a small change and many people seem to be requesting it I hope that we will get to it soon.

wmoore20

Unfortunately article submission requires Firefox 1.5 or newer. I was able to reproduce the problem you described in 1.0.7. However I was able to successfully submit an article using 1.5.0.7. This is due to the javascript based WYSIWYG editor TinyMCE being required, which would explain why Lynx didn't work either.

I have raised an issue to either make it work or make the behaviour more friendly.

0AlanCrowe
Thank you. I'm running Firefox 1.0.3. I guess that the work round from my end is to upgrade. Upgrading to FreeBSD 7.0 stalled when my new CD-ROM drive proved just as incapable of blowing a bit perfect CD as the old one. However I can do a network install, and I'm greatful to you for checking that it will actually work when I get it done.
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